


You Know I'm Bound To You For Life, Nor Would I Have Another

by ialpiriel



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Religious Content, Religious main character, more tags to come, searching for purpose
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 12:41:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12276687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ialpiriel/pseuds/ialpiriel
Summary: When she slides into the access hatch, hauled open with a careful heave and a desperate, wordless prayer toplease let this open, she is greeted by a geometry that’s Wrong.She sinks to her knees, already feels like this is profane. This is not allowed. She should not be here.(AKA: Sister Rust is the minor character I fell in love with, and now you all get to read about how much I love her.)(Tags and pairings may update as I write more.)





	You Know I'm Bound To You For Life, Nor Would I Have Another

**Author's Note:**

> song the title comes from: [X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT9xmRnvax0)
> 
> chapter 1 has spoilers up through sister rust's first appearance, but later chapters will have more and later spoilers.
> 
> someone eats some bugs in this chapter! also there is some physical peril involving throwing up and also blood.

It is four months after Order settles, the first time she approaches them. Her hands shake, more often than not, the rations still too slim, the garden not growing fast enough here in this shattered dome, the once-weekly supplies now only monthly. They’re three days late, this month, and the others are starting to suspect there won’t be any at all.

She sits at Order’s knee, looks out over the plowed-under city blocks. There are seedlings, perfectly spaced, in perfectly straight rows, grass peeking up here and there. That doesn’t seem natural--not in the way it does when it pokes up out of the cracks in the pavement, but in a different way. Like there’s something almost-too-picturesque about it.

She leans back against Order’s knee, her own knees tucked against her chest, arms around her shins. The sun is almost down. There’s no curfew here, but the others will wonder where she is if she stays out too long. That’s better than the curfews. It’s a better way to live, even if they go to bed hungry most nights.

She tips her head back. Something inside Order rumbles, so low and quiet she can barely tell unless she clenches her teeth together, breathes slowly and carefully, blocks out everything else.

She starts to drift like that, snaps back when she hears the crunch of footsteps nearby.

It’s one of the other Choir members--a thin woman, with gnarled hands and sunken eyes, who had come in the first month after Order landed, silent and wide eyed, neck craned to look at Order’s great, imposing bulk, so tall it’s difficult to imagine them moving, living, fighting.

Order is the largest thing Sister Rust has ever seen. They are the largest thing many people here have seen. It’s difficult to not feel a belly-deep sense of awe in their presence.

The other woman--Sister Tin, Sister Rust thinks, thinks of her dried out hands worn down to callus and eczema and rash, how quickly she becomes indignant once you stoke the flame beneath her, the way she sits on her cot and hums to herself in the mornings as she combs out her hair--looks at her, nods once, and then goes to sit against Order’s other knee.

They both sit there in silence as the sun dips below the horizon, and the sky darkens, and the winds pick up and the chill sets in.

Sister Tin leaves, after nightfall, nods to Sister Rust again, but still they share no words.

She is left alone with the deep, barely-perceptible hum of Order.

The food situation. Things will not get better. There won’t be enough food for a long time. They might have to live like this--one meal a day, children and teenagers first, then widows and widowers second, then those who didn’t eat yesterday, those who did eat yesterday with whatever they have left--for a long time. They may face this future, for a long time.

Order must have an answer. Order is divine. Order is _a_ Divine. 

She stands, and turns around, and looks up at Order.

They tower in the sky, blot out what few stars still show through the atmosphere.

The part where the humans go is higher up, in their chest, or their head, probably. There’s a long distance between her, here on the ground, and what she thinks might be the glint of an access hatch, illuminated by the faint blue reflection off Weight. Order’s thigh alone is the size of a medium apartment building, canted at a forty-five degree angle to the ground.

It’s easy to find the first ladder, begin to climb. It’s easy to scale Order’s leg, bent forward to scramble at the surface if she slips. It’s easy, even, to find the ladder on Order’s hip, begin to climb this one too. It has odd angles, where their body is bent, but no bad spacing, and it’s easy to climb past the scant handful of broken or too-rusted rungs.

When she slides into the access hatch, hauled open with a careful heave and a desperate, wordless prayer to _please let this open_ , she is greeted by a geometry that’s Wrong.

She sinks to her knees, already feels like this is profane. This is not allowed. She should not be here. It’s not a big feeling, but it’s something quiet, in the back of her head: her father, rolling his eyes at the preachers on the corners, her mother shuttling them past the first-floor storefront churches a little faster, the way the other children at school would talk about their beliefs and she was left standing aside, uncomfortable, adrift. This isn’t for her. She isn’t allowed to have this. She has wandered the desert so long, surrounded by immediate distractions instead of lasting concerns, the people of a thousand worlds instead of those in her own building, the petty concerns of life instead of the large ones of both life and death, she shouldn’t be here. She venerated no god, no master, no king, no divine, no Divine, she doesn’t deserve to be here on her hands and knees in a foyer that leaves something between her ears feeling like someone turning a t-shirt inside out.

She rests her hands on the floor, closes her eyes, tries to focus on something real.

Without thinking, she rearranges her hands, her knees, her feet, makes her pose as symmetrical as possible.

“I--I come to you, Divine Order, first of the Dead Metal, to--to--to seek your guidance.” She trails off. How do you even petition a god? It’s easy, when you dedicate your actions to them--when you feed the hungry, you ensure that all get their share on their turn. When you wash, dress, care for yourself, you are preserving a routine. When you plant seeds, careful to be methodical, precise, you honor Order by placing them in patterns. How do you pray? how do you ask for a way to replace disorder with order? How do you ask an uncommunicative god to give you an instruction. Do you just--ask? “The people are hungry. They don’t send us enough food. We’ll starve before the seedlings have sprouted. What--what do I do to--”

It’s a blinding flash of questions, and she feels her vision double even behind her closed eyelids. Her elbows and hips give way and she collapses as the rumble around her becomes bone-shaking, tooth-rattling, thick and slow and heavy enough it makes it hard to breathe.

_There is a hungry child on the street. There is a fruit stall nearby. The man behind it has not sold a single piece today. He has a wife and two children at home. What do you do?_

_The war is unwinnable without you. Your body is collapsing beneath you, unable to support even your own weight. What do you do?_

_There is a riot and you may only save one person. Do you save the child, the demonstrator, the police officer, the man, the woman, yourself?_

_A seedling sprouts behind its bedmates, and draws more resources, and does not grow as fast. How do you treat it?_

They go, again and again, more and more, one after the other, so fast she doesn’t have time to think about them, only answer in flashes of impressions, concepts, images, things that don’t and can’t have words.

It stops suddenly, and the rumble subsides to something she can barely feel.

She can feel her hands shaking in the chill of the hallway, finds herself on her side, back arched, elbows tucked against her ribcage and her arms almost crossed, her ankles crossed and her knees drawn up. The air smells like blood, her mouth tastes like blood, and she feels a gentle drip from her nose, her lip, her tongue. She tries to gather the saliva to spit but even that slight movement sends her over the edge, and she retches, her body unfreezing as she tries to roll onto her stomach, chokes out mostly bile. She stays on her knees and elbows, head down after she shuffles away a bit on shaking-harder limbs so she can set her forehead against the floor. it’s not cool, not the way it should be if it were not a Divine, but it’s cooler than the air still.

She feels like someone jammed a hose through her ears, into her skull, and pressure washed it from the inside out. She feels empty, raw, stripped open, like walking naked down main street ringing a cowbell. She feels…at peace. Like things are laid out clearly.

Order.

Order at whatever it costs to maintain it.

It takes time for her hands to stop shaking so much, leave her legs steady enough to climb down from Order’s chest--she’s already higher than any building left in the dome, maybe higher than where the top of the dome used to be, two dozen feet below Order’s shoulder--and she wonders if there’s anyone out looking for her. It’s easy enough to be trapped still, as new buildings collapse under their broken weight. Easy enough to get lost and get hurt. Easy enough to be attacked by someone out of their mind from the drugs they used to mask the hunger, or the pain, or the crushing boredom.

Easy enough to not make it back.

She has to stop a few times on the way to the three-floor low-rent building they had moved into, sit down on a bench, lean against a wall, sit on the ground with her head between her knees, let the nausea or the splitting headache or the overwhelming feeling of her nosebleed and bitten tongue subside. She only has to stop and cough up more bile and blood once, a few blocks from home.

One of the sisters--not Sister Tin, someone else, Sister Ingot, maybe, but every face she sees in the warm glow of the kerosene lamp blurs like there’s a fingerprint over the lens of a camera, so she can't be sure--nearly carries her inside. She’s escorted to the little clinic room just inside the door, ushered into a bed, given two whole pillows to prop herself up. Someone brings tissues and a glass of water. Someone tries to turn more lights on, and she covers her eyes--it’s too much, too bright, sends her power-washed head into a splitting migraine. She moans, and that’s enough for them to turn the lights off, even turn the lamp down. It takes the migraine a bit to subside, and she sips at her water as she waits, and hopes.

Sister Ingot stays, and waves others away with whispered words that Sister Rust can’t parse--it’s like listening through water, just a lot of soft consonants and nothing between them.

Sister ingot stays sitting next to her, and Sister Rust dozes off just as the first signs of light show on the opposite wall.

***

It’s evening again before she can do more than gape and stare and shake her head when people try to talk to her. The words don't make _sense_ , they're just scrambles of sound and tones. They bring her a full meal at lunch--a handful and a half of rice, half a serving of freeze-dried vegetable mix, a cup of juice, some sort of fried insect mixed into the rice--and she eats it. She doesn’t deserve this. She should be back with the others, eating the same as they are. She doesn’t deserve special treatment. She hasn’t earned special treatment. She hasn’t--she hasn’t done the things the Dead Metal demands of them. She hasn’t done them enough. She hasn’t worked hard enough, rededicated herself, done all the things she needs to.

The tray is placed in her lap, and she rearranges the utensils as she waits for the newest round of nausea and anxiety to subside. Plate to the left of the tray, the cup of juice on the right, at the top of the tray, then the fork, horizontal, and then the knife, beneath it. She adjusts the things, bit by bit, until she feels well enough to eat.

Probably-Sister-Ingot sits aside and watches, working on something in her lap. it looks like sewing.

Sister Rust finishes her lunch, sets it aside, murmurs a thanks that sounds foreign even to her own ears when Sister Ingot removes it.

They sit in silence until the evening.

“We followed your...trail back to Order,” Sister Ingot says, when she returns from her evening prayers. 

“My trail?” Sister Rust asks. She sinks lower in her bed, pulls the too-stiff, too-cool blanket up over her shoulders.

“You were bleeding pretty badly. And you were sick a few times. And Sister Tin said she saw you sitting near Order last night, before she came home.” Sister Ingot smiles. Her face is still an odd blur, but each part at least can resolve individually. “What happened?”

“I--” This is heresy. Others have spoken with the Dead Metal, of course, that’s how they know their duties, but she--she’s _no one_ , no one worthy of that privilege. It was an act of hubris, and now she’s filled with regret. “I...petitioned the Dead Metal. I asked for guidance in our food crisis.”

“And did they respond?”

They did, they did. There were the questions, the answers she gave, the sense that her answers weren’t enough. The feeling that at the end of the day she _must_ ensure _something_.

“They did,” she says, and closes her eyes, takes a deep breath.

“Well, what did they say?”

“Nothing--nothing we can use. We must make our own decisions,” she says. They must. 

“Are--are you suggesting the Dead Metal is--” Sister Ingot stops herself, purses her lips, looks at Sister Rust’s face.

“They do not have answers to our immediate problems. They can’t divert supplies to us. They can’t grow a plant any faster. We must do what we can, on our own.”

Sister Ingot nods, and looks away.

***

Sister Tin is sitting at the table, a gun disassembled in front of her. It’s a newer model--it looks bought-military-surplus-after-the-war. it has an OriCon insignia on the grip.

She’s humming, a tune Sister Rust doesn’t know. It’s simple, though, an easy up-and-down that she can follow better than still-nauseating patterns of speech.

“What are you doing?” Sister Rust asks, and sits down on the other side of the table.

“Killing the weapons,” Sister Tin replies, voice quiet like she’s been startled. “They’re good guns, hard to break for good, but they live still.”

This doesn’t take people skills. She can sit here in the kitchen and bask in the swish of Brother Moly washing dishes and Borther Stainless laughing as he dries them and Sister Tin humming to herself and the low hum of voices in the room around them, not her place, not her problem. She’ll feel better soon.

“May I work with you?” she asks Sister Tin. I’ve never done this before, but I would like to learn.”

“The prophet bringing herself down to street level?” Sister Tin smiles, and then her eyebrows go up, and then she laughs. It’s not mockery.

“Prophet?” Sister Rust asks.

“Mm-hmm. Some people have heard that you spoke with order directly. That makes you a prophet of the Dead Metal, right?” Sister Tin’s eyebrows move more, punctuate her words. They’re not moving in any particular way, though.

“I don’t know if I would say that. There are others who have spoken to them.” She shuffles a little. She doesn't like this. She doesn’t want to be The Prophet Of The Dead Metal. She wants her own peace and understanding, her own small place in something larger. She doesn’t want to _be_ the something larger.

“But you’re the most recent.” Sister Tin looks down at what she’s doing with her hands, begins to reassemble the gun. “You’re welcome to join me, of course. More hands make lighter work. There’s a gun case over there, bring two back, I’ll show you how to do it.”

The gun comes apart easier in her hands than a human face does. each piece slots together, each screw comes loose without complaint, each piece moves as part of a united whole. They each have a place. They each go somewhere specific. There is a way for all things to fit.

Sister Copernicum join them, after dinner--she’s young, so young, maybe eighteen at the most, starry-eyed and desperate for meaning. She listens to every word they exchange with each other, eyes wide, ears open, saying very little. She’s awestruck, even as they critique Brother Aluminum’s ability to cook rice without burning it.

Sister Tin has a good laugh, a belly-deep laugh, and it doesn’t take much to coax it out of her. She leans into stories, grins ear to ear as Sister Rust tells a story from before she was here--when she was younger, got in trouble still, a time when she got caught and just barely skirted the consequences, and bragged to her friends about it for weeks afterwards. Sister Tin responds in kind, though her story is instead about a cousin.

The strip the electronics from a dozen guns, and Sister Copernicum takes the stripped pieces back to the leaders in a box, to be disposed of properly. The guns are put back in their cases, locked away, and they part ways for the night, go back to their quarters to sleep.

Sister Ingot demands Sister Rust return to the infirmary, and so she does, settles down in the hospital bed again. Sister Ingot sleeps in a regular cot at the end of the room, snores softly.

Sister Rust stares at the ceiling long into the night, barely able to sleep.


End file.
